Welcome to the third edition of the Carnival of Better Blogging (CoBB #3). This Carnival covers any aspect of blogging: writing, design, analytics, infographics, SEO, etc. As always, there are some great entries this week. So please go check out the articles.

If your entry was accepted, support of this carnival of a link back to this page would be appreciated. If you did not get in, it’s likely you will be accepted in the next edition. Please: no one-paragraph articles or trying to push your affiliate links, and no pages with pop-ups/ pop-unders. These will be deleted immediately. I also have a current aversion to anything about BlogRush because they’re always from bloggers trying to get people to sign up (i.e., have affiliate links).

Enjoy.
Featured Post

This is the featured post for this edition.

1. Pat B. Doyle: Is Your Blog Easy To Read?
Every blogger that enters blog carnivals (or not) should read this. When I have to go through as many submissions as I do (almost) every week, you win points in my editor’s book by having easy to read pages. Else your post has to be exceptional.

Weekly Picks

Here are the weekly entries for this edition.

2. Ant: 10 Questions to Ask When Writing Hypnotic Posts.

3. Doris Chua: 15 FREE Ways to Bring in New Readers to Your Blog/ Site.
4. Edith Yeung: How to Drive Traffic to Your Website or Blog - Part 1.
5. Vaibhav Gadodia: 9 Surefire Tips to Get Traffic to Your Site for New Bloggers.
6. Amanda Harris: Resources For Your Charities Website.
7. Mandy: How Do Bloggers Get To Take A Holiday?
8. Silicon Valley Blogger: Ways to Monetize Your Blog.

That’s it for this edition. If you have an article that you think fits in, please use the Blog Carnival submission form. A couple of notes to consider before entering:

1. If you submitted your article on or after Sep 22nd, it may appear in the next carnival.
2. Please do not resubmit the same article to the same carnival.
3. One entry per person per week (Monday through Sunday), please.

When something is fashionable, everyone wants to be in style. But the current styles disrupt the reader’s experience. In reviewing hundreds of sites as a judge and receiving submissions for the CSS Collection, I discovered lousy content trends. Daring to be different often leads to sacrificing experience, usability and credibility. Here are five ways to instantly improve a Web site.
1. Avoid grey text on light backgrounds

Recently, the design industry decided black bored, so it was time for something different — gray. Somehow this trend caught on as many designs dumped black text for gray.

Black worked. That’s why it was boring and overused. Our monitors typically display colors differently. What I see as strong gray may appear as light gray on your monitor. Most shades of gray on a light background strain the eyes. The problem is worse on monitors that turn regular gray into a shadowy gray giving text a ghostly, hard-to-see look.

Black is hard to miss. Black makes finding links easier. Black is cool. Black needs to come back.
2. Use a larger default font size

Web 2.0 style design changed the bad habit of small text, but many sites still shrink their default text especially on Flash based sites. To make the situation more dreadful, small text in Flash appears blurry.

Though using the Internet is routine for most businesses, many visitors still don’t know they can increase the text size. Besides, it’s an extra step they shouldn’t have to take.

A site has a short open window to convince the reader to stick around. When seeing small text, do you think users stay on the site longer once they get what they want? Boost the text size, save a step and prolong their stay.
3. Avoid using big headers/banners

Web 2.0 also brings the trend of big headers with the Website’s title and lots of space around it. Whitespace works well, but not for headers. Big headers shove valuable content “below the fold” requiring the user to scroll to get the goods.

Vertical scrolling is a mainstay in Web browsing. Agreed. But pushing the important stuff off the screen lowers your chances of keeping a “just browsing” visitor and more so in the business world. Many sites use big headers complemented with a large image, which hides their content below the fold requiring scrolling to get to it.
4. Show readers what your site or business is about — quickly

How many visitors arrive at business sites through a search engine? As you know, search engines don’t distinguish the home page from the other pages. If visitors arrive on an inner page, will they know where they are? Will they know what this site or business does?

Sites need to quickly communicate what they do … on every page. A slogan, title or tagline usually takes care of this. However, not just any tagline will do. What does “We deliver high performance” tell you? Try this. Go to a search engine and enter a keyword for an industry. Randomly click on a few results and see if you can figure out what the business does.
5. Tell readers who is behind the site or business

When you can’t find an “About Us” or “About the Company” page, what do you think?

Though a business or site could be one of the more trustworthy ones, the lack of a decent “About” page hurts. An effective “About” page contains a summary about the company or site, what it does for its customers and includes biographies of people behind the company or site. Take care to avoid jargon. Even better, have an outsider read the “About” page to see if it’s understandable. Go the extra mile and name names accompanying them with photos.

Gain trust by posting privacy and security policies. A simple “We respect your privacy” next to the form requesting information works. You can have a link to the long, blah blah policies to make legal and for those who take this stuff seriously happy. You can turn “We respect your privacy” into a link to the privacy page or put the link in the footer.

Kick butt, take notes

I learned many of these lessons simply from surfing sites, noting first impressions and paying attention to what bothers me or disrupts the experience. If you’re about to embark on a Web design project for a real estate company, surf as many real estate websites as possible, noting the things that work and don’t work. Anything that prompts a feeling, note that too. If something makes you smile, note it. If something frustrates you, note it.

About the author

Meryl K. Evans is the Content Maven behind meryl.net, helping companies build relationships with clients and prospects through content. She is the author of Brilliant Outlook Pocketbook.

Welcome to the second edition of the Carnival of Better Blogging (CoBB #2). This Carnival covers pretty much any aspect of blogging: writing, design, analytics, infographics, etc. As with the last edition, there are some great entries this week. So please go check out as many of the articles out as you have time for.

If your entry was accepted, support of this carnival of a link back to this page would be appreciated. If you did not get in, it’s likely you will be accepted in the next edition. [Please: no one-paragraph articles or trying to push your affiliate links. These will be deleted immediately.]

Enjoy.
Featured Posts

These are the featured posts for this edition.

1. Etienne Teo: The Comprehensive Secrets to Receiving Massive Traffic from Stumbling.
2. Peter Poffenberger: WorldWideWeb WarGames: 8 Ways a Competitor Can Sabotage Your Site.
3. Carole Fogarty: Prevent Leaking Energy in Your Work Space, Ouch! (Part 2 of Is Your Blogging Work Space With You or Against You?)

Weekly Picks

Here are the weekly entries for this edition.

4. Pinyo B: Top 10 Resources to Build a Better Blog.
5. Fred Peters: 10 Forums to Make You a Better Blogger.
6. Aahz: Top 10 Sites Every Blogger Should Join.
7. Taylor: Be Community Involved to Get More Traffic.
8. Thomas Slatin: Sneaky Cheap Website Promotion.
9. Marco Richter: Optimizing Your Permalink Structure.
10. Peter: Why You Should Blog.
11. Charles H. Green: Blogging vs. Podcasting.
12. Isabella Mori: The Z List: Are These My Worst Blog Posts?
13. Vanalli: How to Make Money Blogging.
14. Supermom in NY: Running a contest? Let these Contest Bloggers Know!
15. Madeleine Begun Kane: Ode To The Mobile Web (Cell Phone Browsing Humor).

That’s it for this edition. If you have an article that you think fits in, please use the Blog Carnival submission form. A couple of notes to consider before entering:

1. If you submitted your article on or after Sep 15th, it may appear in the next carnival.
2. Please do not resubmit the same article to the same carnival.
3. One entry per person per week (Monday through Sunday), please.

You’ve produced an editorial calendar, have your writing tools and research sources. But you have a massive to-do list, including blog posts to write, and for some reason the darn things refuse to write themselves. What if you could get them to do that? I have - many times. I can’t tell you why it happens, but here are some tips that might just help you get your creative flow on.

1. Consume content. Not only should you consume a lot of content, you should consume a variety from different channels/ platforms:

1. Print.
2. Radio.
3. TV + film.
4. Internet (print, audio, video).

Consumption of a variety of content is the primary reason that writing usually (but not always) comes easy to me. Just make sure you’re capable of squirreling away facts for later use.
2. Change your point of view. This can be a phsyical change or a conceptual change. Move to another room, or put yourself in the place of a potential reader.
3. Take a break. Overtasking your mind, without a break, is the quickest way to squash creativity and become mentally fatigued. Light physical activity gets your blood flowing, which guarantees your brain is getting enough oxygen - something that might be hampered by sitting for long periods. Just getting up and walking around can help.
4. Change modes. If writing what you need to write isn’t happening, write something else. Write reviews, check out writing tools, write some email.
5. Sleep on it. If all else fails, setting a project aside for a night often gives you clarity. If you’ve done all the research, prep and planning you can, letting your subconscious take over frees up the creative side. Given all the prep, I often wake up with articles already written in my head, and simply have to type them up fast before they fade from memory.
6. Try creative exercises. Jason Rekulak’s book Writer’s Block: 786 Ideas to Jump-Start Your Imagination(non-affiliate), is shaped like a block. And it’s packed full of good ideas. Try scribbling down answers to silly or fun questions, doodling or drawing. Write nonsense words that rhyme. Or not. Just don’t impose any limitations on yourself while you do this. You are not writing/ doodling for publication.
7. Eliminate guilt. Don’t think this will affect you? All I can say is believe me, it will. Guilt about something makes you focus on it the matter at hand, not your work. So you’re distracted and cannot think creatively.
8. Eliminate stress. Stress also blocks creativity. Take a micro-break by doing a bit of deep breathing, or turn on some familiar or creativity-inducing music that invigorates you and/or reminds you of good times.
9. Stop censoring yourself. Write what you want first, and what you need will come of it’s own accord. Not letting out what you want will produce writer’s block.
10. Emulate, then diverge. Successful fiction writers start by emulating the writers they enjoy. And over time, they develop their own style, by changing a few elements here and there. This advice applies to other types of writing, including blogging. But if you’re forcing yourself to develop a new style without knowing what it is, good luck finding creativity.
11. Utilize your cycles. Creativity is cyclical. As someone who’s been writing nearly 30 years, whether in my journal or professionally, I know this to be true. Utilize your peak times, forgive your lows. During the latter, you can do non-creative work such as research, administrative tasks, communications, commenting on other blogs or forums. Or you can brainstorm or map out ideas.

When designing a logo for the blogging community it was important to understand that for the most part a blog is content driven. Because of the type based nature of a blog web site it can be very difficult to grab a readers attention and interest. The blogging community has sush as large number of competing writers that having a solid logo can help grab the interest of a potential reader and lead them into the content creating potential blog subscribers.

This particular client runs a blog that publishes blogging tips, technological news, and computer and internet directed content. The client came to us with the hopes of recreating the brand identity for QUICK ONLINE TIPS and help draw in new readers with a fresh, new look. With no specific direction we came up with distinct concepts that fit with the type of look and style that could help bring in readers.

For the first concept we took the theme of “quick” and create a theme based on the concept of time. Using very detailed gradients a realistic pocket watch was created. In order to create the high gloss look of the silver on the watch a high contrast gradient from black to white was utilizsed. To get the beveled look where the glass meets the silver, two gradients moving in opposing directions create a sharp change in form which gives the illusion of an edge. For the glass, the illusion of transparency was created by softening the color of the watch face from black numbers and elements to a light grey. This creates the feeling of a light reflection bluring the image below the glass.

The overall design of the concept follows the horizontal layout of the web site. The high impact image of the watch helps lead the eye up and across to the name. The completed look conveys a very modern and professional look which helps reflect the content in the blog.

For the second concept, the inspiration of time, quickness, motion and energy were utilized in a semi-abstract design which also symbolizes the initial “Q”. Using the initial as the imagery for the design gives the icon element a specific and unique relation to the name. The addition of the sweeping lines and arrow helped to give the inital extra meaning and context. The use of gradients further enhances the image creating a 3D polished look. Using gradient in opposing direction creates a high-gloss beveled effect that adds a nice sharpness to the image.

The clean and modern look of the graphic portion of the design blends nicely with the modern squared text. Placing the text onto 2 lines and bolding the word “QUICK” creates a focus on the idea that this blog is place to come for the most up to date news and tips.

For the last concept, a softer and generally more inviting sample was created. Using a combination of bright high-gloss colors and a friendly bold text, this concept was designed to invoke a sense of warmth and belonging. The image utilized in this design is a combination of standard “pixel” pointer arrow and a glassy button. The imagery is very recoginzable to avid computer users and developers and creates the idea that all of the information, tips, and news they need is just one click away. To achieve the high gloss look and the sense of depth, gradients were placed in a manner that would optimize the sense of light and shadow. This creates a more realistic look for what would normally be a very flat and ordinary computer element.

By creating a design that has an element of fun and whimsy while keeping the overall imagery relevant to the industry, the feeling of excitement and intrest can be utilized to its maximum potential. Bright colors and a high impact design can really help to distinguish a page full of type from its competitors.

This client was a winner of our free logo design offer in August 2007.

Previous articles in this series

How to design a communications Web 2.0 logo design

How to design an advertising logo design

UPDATE: Here is the black and white version of the logo for faxes, photocopying etc.